Birthplace of Franz Radziwill, Strohausen, Rodenkirchen (Stadland) . Today's Address: To the dikes 15 (in May 2017)

Johann Franz Wilhelm Eduard Radziwill (born February 6, 1895 in Strohausen , today Rodenkirchen in the Wesermarsch , † August 12, 1983 in Wilhelmshaven ) was a German artist of the magic realism . His oeuvreencompasses various creative periods: an early expressionist work, a magical-realistic masterpiece and a late symbolist work. Around 850 oil paintings, 2000 watercolors, drawings and painted postcards as well as 35 prints are known.

He spent most of his life in the North Sea resort of Dangast near Varel am Jadebusen , which inspired him artistically. During the Nazi period he was a member of the NSDAP and worked from 1933 to 1935 as a teacher of fine arts at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf . After some of his early works were considered "degenerate" , he received several temporary exhibition ban. On the other hand, however, he always found recognition. Stylistically, he does not belong to the so-called German art .

About Vita and work is controversial to the present day controversial. Undisputed is his artistic expressiveness. His works are shown nationally, as well as to a lesser extent internationally, in renowned museums.

Biography [ edit | Edit ]

Childhood and Youth / First World War [ edit | Edit ]

Franz Radziwill was born as the eldest of seven children of master potter Eduard Radziwill (1859-1922) and his wife Karoline, nee Suhrendorf (1871-1948) in Strohausen / Wesermarsch. After the relocation of the family in 1896, he grew up first in the working-class district in Bremen-Walle , then in Bremen-Findorff . The parents sent him to the free school on the Großenstraße in Stephaniviertel . From 1909 followed a bricklayer apprenticeship. Thanks to excellent results of the journeyman's examination Radziwill was admitted in 1913 at the Technical State School of Bremen to study architecture and the degree program for industrial design. In evening classes at the Bremer Kunstgewerbeschulehe devoted himself to figurative drawing. Through his mentor, the architect Karl Schwally, Radziwill found access to the circle of artists in Worpswede , including Bernhard Hoetger , Otto Modersohn , Heinrich Vogeler , Jan Bontje van Beek , Olga Bontje van Beek and Clara Rilke-Westhoff . ^[1] The First World War interrupted the artistic development. In 1915 Radziwill was drafted and used until 1918 as a paramedic in Russia , Flanders and northern France.

Artistic departure [ edit | Edit ]

Even during the war, Radziwill decided in favor of painting. After release from English captivity, he found in the Bremen barber Gustav Brocks a sponsor, who made him in the city center his wig making room under the roof as a studio and apartment available. Obernstraße 3 remained Radziwill's postal address until relocated to Dangast in 1923. The painting Houses in Bremen ( State Museum of Art and Cultural History in Oldenburg ) from the period around 1919 is a testimony to this friendship with the dedication "An Gustav Brocks". In the same year Radziwill founded with Heinz Baden, among others, the painters' association The Green Rainbow . The group exhibited their work in April 1919 in theKunsthalle Bremen and then at the Kunstsalon Maria Kunde in Hamburg. ^[2]

In Hamburg, Radziwill got to know the art historians and collectors Wilhelm Niemeyer and Rosa Schapire , who were passive members of the Expressionist artist group Brücke and were close friends with their representatives, especially Karl Schmidt-Rottluff . Radziwill's works received rave reviews, eg. In the magazines Kunstblatt and Cicerone . Until 1954, the intense friendship with Niemeyer remained, as the documented correspondence testifies. ^[3] Niemeyer also conveyed contacts with Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, who gave the younger colleagues on the Council, to paint in the fishing and farming village Dangastafter traveling there with Erich Heckel and Max Pechstein from 1907 to 1912 the summer months. In 1920 Radziwill became the youngest member of the Free Secession in Berlin. He got to know artists and writers like George Grosz , Rudolf Schlichter or Bertolt Brecht . For Radziwill, 1920s Berlin was a unique place of cultural productivity and encounter. ^[4]

Moved to Dangast [ edit | Edit ]

When Radziwill first visited Dangast in 1921 , he first lived in the Dorfkrug and then lodged with a fishing family until he decided to relocate in 1923. In the same year he participated in joint exhibitions in Berlin , Hamburg and New York . Through sales of his works, he was able to acquire a fisherman's house in what is now Sielstraße 3, which he later expanded and in which he lived and worked until his death. In the same year (1923) he married Johanna Inge Haase (1895-1942) from Tweelbäke near Oldenburg . ^[5]

With the move to Dangast, Radziwill entered a phase of upheaval and turned away from Expressionism . In the following years he fundamentally changed his artistic handwriting. He set a new beginning in poetry and lyrical prose. The village life in close proximity to the nature of the Wadden Sea region gave him the impulses for a stylistic change of direction, which went hand in hand with the intensive self-study of Old Masters . With the new post-expressionist works Radziwill already appeared in 1924 in Berlin to the public: In the jury-free art show , he was next to Giorgio de Chirico , Otto Dix , Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmerrepresented with 17 paintings. In 1925 Radziwill's first major solo exhibition took place in the Oldenburg Augusteum . ^[6] It began a lifelong friendship with the Oldenburg neurologist Georg Düser that should be his biggest collectors. ^[7]

Study trips to Holland and Dresden [ edit | Edit ]

In 1925 Radziwill traveled to the Netherlands for the first time . In museums, he studied the painting of the Golden Age . In the Dutch coastal town of Schoorl he made acquaintance with the artist Mathias (Thee) Lau, whom he regularly visited in the following years for painting together. In Amsterdam , Radziwill got to know the art dealer Aaron Vecht, in whose Kunstzaalen A. Vecht he exhibited many times. ^[8th]

In the winter of 1927/1928 a scholarship for Hamburg collectors enabled him to spend several months studying in Dresden to study the originals of Caspar David Friedrich and Carl Gustav Carus . The encounter with the main works of German Romanticism provided Radziwill with decisive suggestions for his landscape paintings. Otto Dix , who was a professor at the Dresden Academy of Arts from the summer of 1927, provided Radziwill with a studio. Inspired by the encounter with Dix, Radziwill created many human portrayals during the Dresden period. For his part, Dix portrayed Radziwill, a somewhat unflattering likeness, which was to play a special role in the exhibition "Degenerate Art" in 1937.

In 1927, the first oil paintings were purchased from public collections. Walter Mueller Wulckow from Oldenburg State Museum acquired the oil painting Bankhaus Garden (1937 seized / lost) ^[9] and Gustav Hartlaub the oil painting for the Kunsthalle Mannheim morning by the Cemetery , 1924 (Kunsthalle Mannheim). In 1928 Radziwill was involved in the exhibition "German Art Dusseldorf" and received for the oil painting The Road , 1928 ( Museum Ludwig, Cologne) the gold medal of the city Dusseldorf. From 1929 followed numerous exhibitions and solo exhibitions, including in Dusseldorf and Amsterdam. Radziwill was represented by established galleries such as Neumann & Nierendorf in Berlin and Andreas Becker in Cologne. ^[10] There he had contact with the socialist-oriented artist group The Cologne Progressives (also group of progressive artists ), to which painters like Heinrich Hoerle , Franz Seiwert and Jankel Adler belonged. In 1931, Radziwill joined the revolutionary November group in Berlin . ^[11]

In 1931, the Oldenburg State Museum of Art and Cultural History acquired the oil painting The Window of my Neighbor , 1931, which accurately reproduces a window in the surrounding masonry façade. Representations of masonry and clinker bricks became the hallmark of the skilled bricklayer and now a successful painter. Returning to German romanticism , Radziwill was close to a movement that became popular in the early 1930s as a new or neo-romanticism . The reference to traditional German art met the demands of national propaganda. On the other hand, in order to assert an independent artistic position, it was titled The SevenFrom March to August 1932, an extensive traveling exhibition took place, in which besides Radziwill the painters Theo Champion , Adolf Dietrich , Hasso von Hugo, Alexander Kanoldt , Franz Lenk and Georg Schrimpf participated. The seven artists met at the invitation of curator Richard Reiche, active in the Wuppertal Kunstverein. ^[12] On September 7, 1932 Ludwig Justi bought as director of the National Gallery in Berlin Radziwill's painting The port II on from the 1930th Shown are the legendary passenger steamer Europe and Bremen , the 1929 and 1930 the Blue Ribbonwon for the fastest Atlantic crossing. The steamer image shows Radziwill's ambivalent fascination with technical developments and his affiliation with the artistic movement of New Objectivity . In this respect, his turn to romanticism is not simply backward-looking, but rather a confrontation with the technical developments of the present. ^[13]

Time of National Socialism / World War II [ edit | Edit ]

Radziwill, who described himself as a "proletarian of art" or "worker of painting," ^[14] was attracted by the ideas of a national socialism and sympathized with the "left wing" of the NSDAP . Already on July 1, 1932, he wrote to his friend Niemeyer: "The revolution of 1918 has not been able to force the inhabitants of the palaces to leave, but the coming will make the palaces disappear ... give Hitler your vote ...". ^[15] On May 1, 1933, two months after the seizure of power , Radziwill joined the party. ^[16]

From 1931 Radziwill was in contact with the sculptor Günther Martin from Oldenburg, founded in 1933 in Berlin the "Ateliergemeinschaft Abbey Road", ^[17] which is about 40 sculptor, painter and graphic different style and political orientation of KPD to Nazi members belonged including Käthe Kollwitz , Herbert Tucholski and Jan Bontjes van Beek , whom Radziwill from Fischerhude knew. As a member of the NSDAP, Martin contributed his idea of ​​German art, which was directed against the Volkish " Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur ", the Prussian Minister of Education Bernhard Rustin front. With Martin Radziwill shared the rejection of the emerging Volkish conception of art, which was propagated by Hitler's art ideologist Alfred Rosenberg , representative of the "Combat League for German Culture". In opposition to Rosenberg, Radziwill and Martin saw themselves as pioneers for a national departure into the modern age. Under the title The Community they realized from 1933 exhibitions. ^[18]

In July 1933 Radziwill was appointed Professor of Fine Painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf , after professors such as Heinrich Campendonk , Paul Klee and eight other job holders were dismissed from their posts by the National Socialists . ^[19] 1934 was Radziwill on the XIX. Biennale in Venice with the paintings The Road , 1928 (Coll. Museum Ludwig Cologne) and The Sender Norddeich (1932, Coll. Deutsches Postmuseum Frankfurt) represented.

Around 1934 Radziwill began the controversial, later redrawn image with the original title Revolution , later demons , on which a slain SA man lies on the road. In the original condition, the hanged, the ghosts, two banners and the inscription on the façade were missing "In the light of the ideas of the state or the one to kill the other". In the Nazi era , the picture was not issued and played a role in Radziwill's release from the Magisterium, presumably because after the so-called Roman coup in 1934, the "left" wing of the SA was discredited. In addition, the slain SA man looks a little heroic and rather pitiful. ^[20]

After Franz Radziwill, who was prepared for no artistic concessions, had lost his position in the Reich Chamber of the Fine Arts in May 1934 , he made a complaint for frequent absence from the Düsseldorf Academy Director. As often as possible, Radziwill and his students went to the Lower Rhine for painting. B. to Kalkar . ^[21]

In the fall of 1934, students close to the "Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur" discovered early expressionist works by Radziwill in the attic of the Hamburger Kunstakademie , which his friend Niemeyer had deposited there. Then the painter was publicly denounced as a "Kulturbolschewist" and a representative of the so-called "decay art". ^[22] In April 1935, one of his exhibitions was prematurely closed in the Jenaer Kunstverein. In September 1935, the dismissal from the Magisterium in Dusseldorf with the official explanation "educational inability" took place.

Radziwill returned to Dangast and dedicated himself to the expansion of his home with a large studio on the first floor, from which he could see the Jade Bay . Undeterred, he continued his artistic work. At the same time he also took over the function of a NSDAP Kreiskulturstellenleiter in the district of Friesland and the specially created for him post of a Ortsgruppenpropagandaleiters in Dangast, as the Oldenburg Gauleiter Carl Röver , who appreciated him as a painter, had advised him. ^[23]In this role, Radziwill passed on a complaint addressed to him: During the march to Labor Day on May 1, 1937 from Dangast to Varel, two Dangaster NSDAP members had prematurely gone and visited a pub. An official of the German Labor Front complained about this to Radziwill, who for his part complained to his department. The matter did not affect anyone involved.

Regarding his expressionist early work, which had given the impetus to the loss of the professorship, Radziwill was rehabilitated in 1936 with the support of Gauleiter and Reich Governor Carl Röver and Reich Minister Joseph Goebbels . It expressed the contradictory orientation of the Nazis in art until 1937. While Goebbels and Göring sympathized with Expressionism as genuinely German art, Rosenberg, as the leading ideologue and mouthpiece of Hitler's views, fundamentally rejected modern art. In 1937, the anti-modern Nazi art doctrine became definitive with the exhibition "Degenerate Art" in Munich .

After being released from the Dusseldorf Academy in 1935, solo exhibitions of works by Radziwill took place until May 1938, including 1936 in Wilhelmshaven , 1937 in the Municipal Museum in Wuppertal, in the Kunstverein Köln and in the Hamburg Kunstkabinett Hildebrand Gurlitt . ^[24] The latter ended prematurely with a scandal that was dangerous to the gallery. Even in the run-up to the Degenerate Art campaign , the art historian Gurlitt exhibited Modern Art in his Hamburg gallery. The Radziwill exhibition in 1937 was received in the press mainly positive. On the occasion of the opening lecture by Wilhelm Niemeyer in the presence of the artist, representatives of the Nazi Students' Association were raisedheavy reproaches against the speaker. Subsequently, they boycotted his lectures at the college, and Niemeyer's name appeared in the pillory of the Munich exhibition Degenerate Art as a "critic of the system time". After Maike Bruhns the dispute was triggered by Radziwill's war pictures, but the attack was also directed against Gurlitt, whose grandmother was of Jewish descent. ^[25] On 31 March 1937 Niemeyer wrote to Radziwill, the Hamburg Kunsthalle's director Werner Kloos 've had announced that "Gs Bude would be closed if it should issue your images of war." ^[26]

In February 1938, Radziwill exhibited at the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven . At the same time he was already denounced as a " degenerate " artist. The Munich propaganda exhibition Degenerate Art showed the portrait of Radziwill painted by Otto Dix in the winter of 1927/1928 in Dresden in the accompanying exhibition brochure. In the eponymous exhibition from February 1938 in Berlin, three early works by Radziwill were shown. The painting Nude woman with a clothed man in a room (circa 1920, lost) is shown in the exhibition brochure. ^[27]

Hitler formulated his rejection of modern art in the opening speech to the great German art exhibition at the Munich House of Art on July 18, 1937, in which he stated that he had "observed among the submitted pictures some works in which one must actually assume that certain people the eye shows things differently than they are, that is, there are really men who see today's characters of our people as degenerate cretins, who basically perceive meadows blue, sky green, clouds of sulfur yellow, etc., or, as they may say, experience , I do not want to get involved in a dispute about whether these people really see and feel that way or not, but in the name of the German people I just want to forbid that such unfortunate unfortunates^In 1938 Radziwill painted the picture Grodenstraße to Vareler harbor with corresponding provocative color scheme with yellow-green-blue sky. Already the picture of 1937 shell limestone mill in Vareler harbor showed similar colors. ^[29]

The painting The Street , which Radziwill had brought in 1928 with the "Golden Medal of the City of Dusseldorf " and represented the art of the new German Reich at the Biennale in Venice in 1934 , was given by the President of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, Adolf Ziegler , on 9 November Konigsbergconfiscate. The exhibition planned there had to be canceled. In total, over 50 works by Radziwill were confiscated - including paintings, watercolors and prints. Most of them have disappeared. If one individually counts the pages of the printed portfolio, the number of works seized is 275, of which 244 works are now considered destroyed. In a letter from the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts of May 20, 1938 to Radziwill Ziegler imposed an exhibition ban on solo exhibitions. ^[30]

Radziwill experienced a change of appreciation and defamation. Although he had already distanced himself from his expressionist early work in 1923 with the move to Dangast and since 1933 a member of the party, he could prevent neither the dismissal as a professor nor the confiscation of his works. In Munich and Berlin ostracized, he still had success in the northwest. Through contact with senior naval personnel in nearby Wilhelmshaven he took from 1935 to 1939 on boat trips to Brazil , the Caribbean Islands , North Africa , Spain , Britain and Scandinaviapart. The painter made friends with the admirals Otto Ciliax and Hermann von Fischel and the painting naval officer Fritz Witschetzky. He was also acquainted with Admiral Wilhelm Canaris . As commissioned work emerged 1936 Expiring submarine for the youth hostel in Rüstringen and 1939 The tank battle of Cambrai 1917 for the Lübeck Cambrai barracks. However, Radziwill's naval images were not propagandistically exploitable since they were apocalypticand ruthlessly portrayed the threatening force of the war machine. Some critics praised the pictures, in other newspaper reports the painter lacked heroism and lack of will to fight. ^[31] The painting The submarine warfare / Total war / Lost Earth from 1939 in 1941 shown on the big Gau exhibition Weser-Ems in Oldenburg first, then suspended. ^[32] In this apocalyptic scenario, now in the collection of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich, followed by other images of destroyed landscapes and ruins. The theme of the destruction of human life and nature through war, technical hubris and economic developments occupied the painter until his death.

In contrast to his early commitment to National Socialism , which was determined by the hope for social and national justice, Radziwill was increasingly distant from the Nazi regime in the mid-1930s. He had friendships with pastors of the Confessing Church, such as Otto Wellmann and Fritz Schipper. In 1937, under the pretext of a studio visit, a forbidden assembly of the Confessing Church took place in Radziwill's house. Subsequently, the painter was interrogated by the Gestapo . ^[33] The turning away from National Socialism 1938 Still Life with Fuchsia(Collection Claus Hüppe, courtesy Kunsthalle Emden) recognizable. The painting shows a book on a table, on whose back the title "Power goes before law" can be read. Nevertheless, Radziwill summed up in 1939 in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Niemeyer that the year 1938, in which he was banned from exhibiting, was not only a time of humiliation, but also "the most creative and successful" of his life. ^[34]

From 1939 to 1941 Radziwill was sent to the Western Front as a soldier, exempted from military service in 1941 for reasons of age, but in 1942 he was again obliged to serve in the air raid police in Wilhelmshaven and at the fire department in Dangast. In the same year his wife died. Deeply shaken, he traveled to friends on the Mosel and in Styria . In 1944 he was employed as an air raid policeman in Wilhelmshaven, then as a technical draftsman in the machine factory Heinen in Varel , drafted in April 1945 to the Volkssturm and sent to Schleswig-Holstein . There he came into English captivity, from which he could escape, so that he came back in the winter of 1945 to Dangast.

Postwar [ Edit | Edit ]

1956 in the GDR: Heinrich Drake , Radziwill and Max Schwimmer

In a letter to the sculptor Gerhard Marcks in 1947, the expressionist painter and director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin called Karl Hofer Radziwill "Nazi will." He wrote: Breker also lets me assail indirectly, but this denazification does not really seem possible to me, although he unlike the pig dogs Nolde and Naziwill behave decently and helpfully. ^[35]

To Hofers indignation over Radziwill has probably contributed the statement of the gallery owner Alex Vömel , Radziwill 1933 prevented a Hofer exhibition in the Krefeld Kunstverein and expressed negative about a number of artists. Vömel had misinformed both Carl Hofer and the foreign press and admitted that in 1948. After Hofer had heard the revocation, he quoted Radziwill in the journal Bildende Kunst , which he published at that time: "Man stands between God and nature, he loses God, he loses nature - he loses nature, he loses God, in In both cases always also the humans and thus everything. The abstract lost nature and with it God and man. " ^[36]

In the denazification process Radziwill was initially assigned as the category IV of the followers . After his objection in 1949 with the classification in category V followed the discharge. ^[37]

After the traumatic experience of a Second World War and the loss of his wife, Radziwill devoted himself increasingly to religious topics. His artistic concern was the counter-design to a materialistically oriented society, as he experienced it in post-war Germany. He saw himself in the role of the admonisher, whose images call for repentance on the way to further disasters. He pleaded for a radical rethinking and a renewed understanding of religion in the sense of pacifism, Limits of economic growth and preservation of nature. The distinction between the cosmos as a human space of existence and the sky as the sphere of the divine became an essential part of his message. His late work revolves around the limits of scientific knowledge and the incalculable dangers of cross-border experiments.

In the spring of 1947 Radziwill married the writer Anna Inge Rauer-Riechelmann (1906-1990). She came from Veltheim am Fallstein . In September of the same year Radziwill's only daughter Konstanze was born. ^[38]

From 1947 Radziwill wrote essays in which he repeatedly warned against the destruction of culture and the resulting end of art as an indispensable meaningful and unifying nation. He denied abstract art because, as he and many other artists of the New Objectivity claimed (Otto Dix), they were not fit for dealing with the urgent questions of the times. From 1956 to 1966 he regularly participated in conferences for visual artists in the Protestant Academy Loccum . With lectures he participated in seminars, which dealt with the artistic design of statements of faith. ^[39]

When visual arts redefined themselves in the Federal Republic after 1945, the abstract painting that was outlawed by the National Socialists was predominant. It shaped the reorientation of the museums and the art market. As a representative of a figurative painting Radziwill remained in the offside. The work The Beauty of Aloneness , 1948 (State Museum of Art and Cultural History Oldenburg), which shows a lonely skater in the port, refers to it. Due to the difficult economic situation, the family rented the summer over the old fisherman's house to spa guests and the painter exchanged pictures with private friends for food. ^[40]

From 1950 Radziwill undertook trips to the newly founded GDR . There, figurative art as a socialist realism was still a program. In 1955 and 1956 Radziwill was involved in exhibitions in the German Academy of Arts. In 1957, the East Berlin National Gallery showed a comprehensive solo exhibition of him. The left-leaning journal Tendenzen was the only one that regularly published illustrations of his works in the Federal Republic. ^[41]

Commitment to conservation [ edit | Edit ]

For Radziwill, the experience of primordial nature was existential. Land and sea, flora and fauna of the northern German coastal region were his indispensable sources of inspiration. All the more sensitive he registered the change in his environment, as with the " economic miracle " a new dimension of tourism in the small peninsula located village Dangast on Jade Bay broke. Since the mid-1950s, Radziwill has been committed to preserving his adopted country as a place of artists. In addition, he fought as an environmental activist for nature conservation, He demonstrated against construction projects, opposed the mining of sand and gravel, and was a volunteer bird protection officer in the Wadden Sea area for over a decade. Letters, newspaper reports and photographs prove his commitment to the preservation of the original landscape, which already fascinated the bridge painters , and which was finally put under landscape protection on Radziwill's initiative. ^[42] Often his critique of civilization, which is recognizable in numerous paintings of the last phase of life, moored to Dangaster motifs. The beginning of his dispute with the transformation of the coastal area mark several commissioned work on the subject of coastal protection and land reclamation, which he received in 1952 from the Water Department Wilhelmshaven. ^[43]

Late Achievements [ edit | Edit ]

With the return of realism to contemporary art, Radziwill's work received renewed attention. From the mid-sixties large solo exhibitions took place in museums and art associations. Through his friendship with the surrealist Edgar Ende , in 1959 he joined the international artist community CIAFMA, Center International de l'Actualité Fantastique et Magique , which propagated fantastic realism as a counter-flow to abstract painting. From 1960 to 1966 Radziwill took part in group exhibitions of the CIAFMA. ^[44]

In 1963 Radziwill was awarded the Rome Prize of the German Academy and spent the beginning of 1964 three months as a guest of honor in the Villa Massimo . He then traveled to Greece. Mythological subjects were increasingly included in his painting. ^In 1968, he discovered the Milan art historian and art dealer Emilio Bertonati. The occasion for this was a large solo exhibition with around 200 works in the Cologne Gallery of Architecture . Bertonati, a recognized connoisseur of Pittura metafisica , sold numerous works to Italian collectors in his Galleria del Levante and initiated further exhibitions in Milan , Rome and RomeParma .

For Radziwill's 75th birthday, the Bremer Kunstverein hosted a comprehensive retrospective at the Kunsthalle in the winter of 1970/1971 . On the occasion of his 80th birthday in 1975, the State Museum of Art and Cultural History honored Oldenburg with an extensive exhibition. Through donations and long-term loans by the artist, as well as purchases by the state of Lower Saxony , the largest public collection of his works was created in the Landesmuseum Oldenburg. ^[46]

In 1978, Hans Koschnick , mayor of Bremen, with the support of banks, bought the oil painting The Lamentation of Bremen from 1946. As a memorial, it depicts the destroyed Hanseatic city after the Second World War. The work hangs in the upper hall of the Bremen town hall. ^[47] showed the largest exhibition of his work during his lifetime, with over 400 exhibits, the " New Society for Visual Arts " (NGBK), from November 1981 to January 1982 in Berlin. Afterwards, the most important pictures of this exhibition could be seen in 1982 in the Landesmuseum Oldenburg and the Kunstverein Hannover . ^[48] Due to an eye problem Radziwill gave the painting in 1972. On August 12, 1983, he died in a hospital in Wilhelmshaven. ^[49]

Plant [ edit | Edit ]

The painter Franz Radziwill occupies an exceptional position in 20th century art history. From the point of view of art history, the outline of his oeuvre in expressionist early works, the new-mastered and magical-realistic masterpiece as well as the symbolist late work. The complete work includes landscapes, still lifes and portraits. The central theme of the painter is the tension between nature and technology. Stylistically, he was inspired by innovative artists of the early 20th century, first works are visibly influenced by Vincent van Gogh , Edvard Munch and Marc Chagall .

Expressionism [ edit | Edit ]

After a period of experimentation, dealing with the bridge painters had a decisive impact on his early work. Especially Karl Schmidt-Rottluff became a role model for the young painter. Radziwill was inspired by Expressionism. He fabulierte with unreal proportions, perspectives and fairytale ideas, with the latter he went beyond the Expressionism. Academic rulesdid not interest him at first. He reduced individual picture elements to striking shapes. Already in the early work he found a spatial conception, which he took up again in the late work. Not infrequently, the picture spaces appear nested collage. The boundaries between home and space are in the process of dissolution. Strong close-up views of extreme escapes point to other dimensions in which the depicted event is involved. From 1919 to 1922, expressionist woodcuts were printed in black and white. In the published by Wilhelm Niemeyer and Rosa Schapire art magazine Die Kündung appear in 1921 five woodcuts commissioned works. In 1922/23 he devoted himself to etching as a medium for the duplication of his pictorial ideas. In the form ofDrypoint etchings he dealt with the same subjects as in the oil paintings of this time. ^[50]

Upheaval [ edit | Edit ]

After moving to the fishing and farming village of Dangast on Jadebusen in 1923, Radziwill broke away from expressionist style and found a new artistic position. The previous style of painting no longer corresponded to his artistic intention. The immediate surroundings of the nature of the Wadden Sea meant for him a new scenic challenge. It was clear to him from the expanse of the landscape that he had moved too far from reality in the course of the renewal of traditional artistic conventions. Already from 1924 he conceived his pictures more realistically and studied in this intention the old German and Dutch art of the 16. to 18. Century. Study visits in Holland strengthened his style change. He also devoted himself to the fantastic panoramas of Pieter Bruegeland Hieronymus Bosch , studied the atmosphere in the works of Hercules Seghers and the focusing light of Rembrandt van Rijn . Radziwill admired the artisan virtuosity of the Old Masters, who had lost their meaning with the advent of abstract art . In 1924, Radziwill quoted Albrecht Dürer's famous watercolor Das große Rasenstück (State Museum for Art and Cultural History Oldenburg), to which he added a broken clinker brick as a former bricklayer. As a skilled bricklayer and son of a master potter, he had internalized traditional craftsmanship.

The autodidact took over the perspective from the Dutch landscapes and thus allows the observer to look at the events from a slightly elevated position. He placed the horizon line in the lower third of the picture. He achieved a depth effect that suggests the vastness of the landscape. At the same time, his image spaces darkened. Radziwill created eerie night scenes and set stark contrasts from bright to dark. The fantastic lighting became, as it were, a distinguishing feature of his art.

Further decisive suggestions were provided by German Romanticism. Radziwill discovered a kind of affinity with his feelings about nature in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and Carl Gustav Carus . From her works he took up compositional structures, motivic borrowings, analogies or even picture quotes. In addition to nature views under high skies and snowy landscapes, he took over the window motif as a typical romantic topos .

New Objectivity and Magic Realism [ edit | Edit ]

With the lifelike representation in the manner of an old master, Radziwill moved in the current of the New Objectivity and soon , with surrealistic echoes of his pictorial inventions, was considered a leading exponent of the magic realism . Fascinated by Giorgio de Chiricoand the Pittura Metafisica , he included corresponding borrowings in his work. Radziwill intensified the expression of his pictures through clarity or intensity of color in such a way that reality became a mystery. With the ability to bring reality into the picture and at the same time to suggest another, metaphysical dimension, he takes an unmistakable position in the painting of his time.

Late work [ edit | Edit ]

After the Second World War, Radziwill developed an increasingly symbolic painting . All the basics of his work have been combined with ideas derived from mystical ideas and Christian pictorial traditions. In his artistic self-understanding, a paradigm shift took place. If the presence of the transcendent in his earlier works can only be guessed "in the interstices of the real" ^[51] , he developed in the later work a personal figurative symbolism for the presence of the metaphysical or divine. Again, his study of old masters offered a wealth of forms of presentation, which he processed in new ways. Of particular importance to him were Albrecht Altdorfer andMatthias Grünewald . On the one hand, he developed pictographs that came from his own mythology, on the other hand, he used the Christian iconography. The new elements were the expression of his expanded artistic message, they are vehicles to make an invisible dimension visible.

Radziwill pointed out the idea of ​​another order with the painting The Cosmos Can Be Destroyed, Heaven Not , 1953 (Coll. Stadtmuseum Oldenburg). The painting imagines the disintegration of the previously firmly established world order. The breaking firmament of the scientific world view in front of the infinitely appearing space represents the earthly living space of man, who, despite all destruction, remains surrounded by a divine universe. Also in other pictures there are references to such a belief: Mechanical time is not the Creator's time , 1947 or Where the tree no longer grows, is God too, 1951. Jürgen Hoffmann (1981) describes Radziwill's motives as the intended polarization of human and divine existence in order to visualize metaphysical correlations. ^[52]

With the growing commitment to landscape conservation, the religious image content fell back a bit, but remained latent in the civilization-critical motives. The human hubris themed Radziwill in the painting The Fall of Icarus , 1960, and created a new variant of the fatal crash Karl Buchstätters , 1928 (Coll. Museum Folkwang, Essen). The latter goes back to a real crash at an air show in Bremen in 1913, the Radziwill witnessed as an eyewitness and who coined his critical attitude to the modern belief in progress. ^[53]

Overpaintings [ edit | Edit ]

In the postwar period Radziwill painted over some of his works from the Nazi era and shortly before. These changes are valued differently. Radziwill increasingly embellished his works with signs of the presence of metaphysical powers. As the creator of his works, he considered it legitimate to additionally load earlier new works with symbols in order to give them another level of meaning. Although this "further painting" of images seems to be problematic from the point of view of art history, the artist claims to be the author himself, when a picture is completed. ^[54]With the inserted new picture elements Radziwill brought his works from different creative phases on a common statement level. Above all, the overpaintings show a changed artistic conception of the painter. B. in publications of the Franz Radziwill Society and other contributions is highlighted.

It is different in the picture revolution / demons , in which by additions, which developed predominantly after 1945, compared to the original intention a political statement was changed. There are two versions of the painting Stahlhelm in No Man's Land : First of all, the work is readable as a "Victim for the Fatherland", after the revision as a lawsuit. ^[55]

A prominent example of a further-drawn picture is the work created in 1940 and revised until 1950, Flanders / Where in this world . In the format 119 × 170 cm Radziwill painted the picture Flandersagainst the background of his experiences as a soldier in the First World War. He remembers these experiences when the German Wehrmacht invaded Belgium in the Second World War. First, the graves of the fallen of all participating nations and the misery of the fleeing civilian population were the focus of the work. In the years 1945-1950, the painter added German and American planes and dramatically shattered the sky. In doing so, he reinforced the original message that the war with human sacrifice is paid on all sides and leaves the world destroyed. The new title is Wohin in this world, Stylistically, the painting shows Radziwill's transition from magical realism to an apocalyptically tuned symbolism and, as it were, illustrates his biography with all its contradictions and changes of mind. As one of the main works, the painting was on loan to the artist since 1968 in the collection of the East Berlin National Gallery until it was purchased in 2012 and in the exhibitions Modern Times. The collection 1900-1945 and "The Divided Sky". The 1945-1968 collection was exhibited from 2010 to 2013 in the Neue Nationalgalerie. Most recently, the work 2015/16 was on show New Gallery: "The Black Years" - Stories of a Collection 1933-1945 at Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

Honors [ edit | Edit ]

• 1928: "Golden Medal" of the city ​​of Dusseldorf for the painting The New Road
• 1964: Rome Prize of the German Academy
• 1965: Great Cross of Merit of the Lower Saxony Order of Merit
• 1970: Grosses Niedersächsischer Staatspreis and honorary gift of the Oldenburg Foundation
• 1971: Grand Cross of Merit for the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
• 1978: Oldenburg Prize of the Oldenburg landscape.
• 1980: The 85th birthday entry in the "Golden Book" of the city of Oldenburg
• The Franz-Radziwill-Weg in Bremen- Findorff , district Weidedamm was named after him.
• In Wilhelmshaven, there is also a Franz Radziwill trail in the Maadetal development area .
• In Oldenburg exists a Franz Radziwill street in the district Kreyenbrück.
• In 1995, Deutsche Post published in the series " German Painting of the 20th Century " the brand Der Wasserturm in Bremen by Franz Radziwill.

Reception [ edit | Edit ]

As a painter Radziwill has gone through various periods of artistic development. Despite his radical change of style and changing artistic positions, his work remains unmistakable. Masonry, rotating airplanes and bursting skies are typical elements of his repertoire. Through his detailed style of painting, Radziwill became famous in the 1920s as a "rivet painter", who brought metal shipwrecks to the screen just as minutely as Sieltore from Bockhorner clinker. When abstract art forms dominated the exhibition in the post-war period, the artist was forgotten with his work, but was rediscovered in the late 1960s when reality returned to contemporary painting.

It is above all the commitment of the Franz Radziwill Gesellschaft e. V. that Radziwill's work can be seen in annually changing exhibitions at the site of its creation. Since 1986, the Franz Radziwill Society has devoted itself to systematically reconditioning the entire work, which began with major retrospectives from the late sixties and often took place in connection with birthdays or memorial days.

Due to his initial sympathy for National Socialism, the painter is regarded as a politically naive or system-conforming opportunist. That he himself was considered "degenerate" and from 1938 was banned from exhibiting for solo exhibitions is beyond question; that he belonged to the party during the entire Nazi period and was still an official of the NSDAP in Dangast at the end of the war, too. Whether he left the regime in 1935 after his removal as a professor from the Düsseldorf Academy or only in the last years of the war is a matter of controversy. The creative period from 1933 to 1945 was in 2011 as part of the exhibition The Painter Franz Radziwill in the period of National Socialismin Dangast, Wilhelmshaven and Oldenburg. In an accompanying publication, the state of research was extensively reviewed, ^[56] although controversial assessments persisted. There is overwhelming agreement among critics and defenders in the assessment of his works, in which he painstakingly made no compromises with the Nazi doctrine of art .

His works are today in almost all German and many international museums. Numerous exhibitions and scientific publications testify to the importance of Radziwill in German and international art history.

In 1995, the painting The Water Tower in Bremen (coll. Claus Hüppe, courtesy Kunsthalle Emden) from 1931 appeared as a motif of a special stamp of the Deutsche Bundespost. Radziwill's assignment to the traditional series of important German painters confirmed in 2013 the exhibition D'Allemagne in the Louvre in Paris , where his painting Church in the Frisian Wehde , 1930, hung next to paintings by Caspar David Friedrich.

Also in 2013, a façade painting was created on Luisenstraße in the district of Südstadt in Wilhelmshaven: With a surface area of ​​over 100 square meters, the Radziwill wall in 1928 shows a painted picture of a shipyard in Wilhelmshaven . Realized by the painter Buko Königshoff, it was inaugurated on October 8, 2013. ^[57]

To this day, Radziwill is considered one of the most important representatives of German painting of the 20th century and is frequently represented in group or theme exhibitions, for example 2015/2016 with two oil paintings, The Checkered Towel and Harbor II , in the show New Objectivity: Modern Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933 at the Museo Correr in Venice and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in the United States.

In 2015/2016, Radziwill was also represented with several paintings in the exhibition Messerscharf and in love with detail: Works of the New Objectivity , which was shown in the Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie in Regensburg and subsequently in the Landesgalerie Linz(Austria).

Radziwill painting Since May 2016, the red plane , 1932, enriches the Städel Museum's collection with an important position in Modern Art. The purchase made on the occasion of the departure of director Max Hollein fits into the inventory of New Objectivity works and is an addition to works by Otto Dix, Karl Hubbuch and Lotte Laserstein. The work also suits the airport city of Frankfurt in terms of image motifs where planes are an important aspect of urban identity. In 2018, the Bavarian State Painting Collections in Munich (Pinakothek der Moderne) acquired the painting "The Grodenstraße to Varelerhafen", 1938.